Quotes

1. “Natural ability without education has more often attained to glory and virtue than education without natural ability.” (Cicero)

2. “In religion and politics, people’s beliefs and convictions are in almost every case gotten at second-hand, and without examination, from authorities who have not themselves examined the questions at issue, but have taken them at second-hand from other non-examiners, whose opinions about them were not worth a brass farthing.” (Mark Twain)

3. “You’ll worry less about what people think about you when you realize how seldom they do.” (David Foster Wallace)

4. “Whenever I hear that someone is pragmatic (in a political context), odds are good that he/she is pretending not to have an ideology.” (Rich Berger, here)

5. “Homer: Why’d they build this ghost town so far away?
Lisa: Because they discovered gold right over there!
Homer: It’s because they’re stupid, that’s why. That’s why everybody does everything.” (The Simpsons – found here. Me: The big problem with that hypothesis is that a theory that explains everything explains nothing)

6. “Life is not fair and people are not equal.” (“Words to Live By: Hiroo Onoda”, Judit Kawaguchi)

7. “The years are too short, the days are too long.” (Joseph Heller)

8. “To my embarrassment I was born in bed with a lady.” (Wilson Mizner – if I’m asked that question, from now on I’ll answer: ‘Yes, I have been to bed with a woman.’ That’s how I prefer to lie. By omission.)

About me/this blog

This blog is mainly a site where I keep track of and share some of the stuff I read and learn. Only a small subset of the posts on this blog deal with economics – I have diverse interests, and as the category cloud in the sidebar below illustrates this blog contains posts about all kinds of stuff: Mathematics, physics, statistics, geology, geography, health care and medicine, psychology, evolutionary biology, genetics, history, anthropology, archaeology, chess, …

You’re always welcome to ask questions in the comment section. New readers should be aware that the first comment someone leaves on this blog is always withheld automatically to limit spam and needs to be approved by me before it appears on the site; so your first question or comment may not appear immediately.

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Goodreads Quotes

"Happiness and its anticipation are […] proximate mechanisms that lead us to perform and repeat acts that in the environments of history, at least, would have led to greater reproductive success." (Richard D. Alexander)